CARRION

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw that lovely summer day?

On a pile of stones where the path turned off, the hideous carrion-

legs in the air, like a whore - displayed, indifferent to the last,

a belly slick with lethal sweat and swollen with foul gas.

The sun lit up that rottenness as though to roast it through,

restoring to Nature a hundredfold what she had here made one.

And heaven watched the splendid corpse like a flower open wide-

you nearly fainted dead away at the perfume it gave off.

Flies kept humming over the guts from which a gleaming clot

of maggots poured to finish off what scraps of flesh remained.

The tide of trembling vermin sank, then bubbled up afresh

as if the carcass, drawing breath, by their lives lived again

and made a curious music there - like running water, or wind,

or the rattle of chaff the winnower loosens in his fan.

Shapeless - nothing was left but a dream the artist had sketched in,

forgotten, and only later on finished from memory.

Behind the rocks an anxious bitch eyed us reproachfully,

waiting for the chance to resume her interrupted feast.

- Yet you will come to this offence, this horrible decay,

you, the light of my life, the sun and the moon and the stars of my love!

Yes, you will come to this, my queen, after the sacraments,

when you rot underground among the bones already there.

But as their kisses eat you up, my Beauty, tell the worms

I've kept the sacred essence, saved the form of my rotted loves!